As we all know, storage is an integral part of our day to day operations which involve high speed analytics and ability to process large volumes of data in-memory and faster disks.

Data is growing at exponential rates and businesses are struggling maintain competitive advantage by analyzing ever-larger datasets without interruptions for hardware upgrades.

Application and operations developers need multiple copies of databases to respond quickly to competitive demands for new and enhanced services. Some of these data assets are very large. Providing DevOps teams with up-to-date copies needs to be swift, repeatable and lightweight, and must not interfere with the production dataâ€™s integrity, protection and performance.
Database users and administrators have special challenges in protecting and recovering the organizationâ€™s most critical digital assets while meeting service levels for availability, data integrity and security.

Db2 Warehouse (in-memory and columnar analytics database) provides the opportunity to leverage the distributed storage architecture and ease of integration with the infrastructure of your choice. It allows the users to take advantage of the speedy Docker container deployment using MPP (massively parallel processing) engine across different forms of mixed workloads.
We are excited to bring to you the benefits of our close integration with NetApp in terms of variety of use cases on a private cloud and virtual private cloud platform.

NetApp brings along the benefits and storage leadership and innovation in NFS and network storage integration, helping Db2 Warehouse to make things simple to manage for our customers.

It addresses use cases of Cloud portability and elasticity using techniques and solutions within the ONTAP storage systems which includes Snapshots and Flex Clones, making Db2 Warehouse implementation and storage configuration as easy as plug and play with advanced data protection and cloning capabilities. It integrates with the containers via Docker Storage plugin, which further enhances the portability and micro services architecture support for Db2 Warehouse. NetAppâ€™s Data Fabric architecture allows Db2 Warehouse to quickly realize multi-cloud and hybrid cloud data movement and storage options, including data efficiencies, Quality of Server (QoS), Encryption and data replication, which could otherwise be a challenge to design from the ground up.

Placing the clustered file system directly on the storage instead of on the hosts allows ONTAP to apply its advanced data management functionality down to the file level. Testing with block protocols is out of scope for this project. However, many NetApp customers do use FC SAN or iSCSI for host connectivity with excellent results.

We will focus on three key use cases that delivers much broader value and ease of storage management. The diagram below gives a high level overview of the configuration.

Use Case 1: Local Backup and Restore
This is the most common use case. Db2 Warehouse facilitates storage-level snapshots as a means to backup and restore the database. The snapshots can be integrated with suspending the database writes to achieve consistent application backups.

Use Case 2: Database Portability using NetApp
Customers want to take a subset or a full copy of their database to set up for testing/support/UAT, within the same data center or across geographies (another data center). We will explore cloning of database and moving it to another server in the same data center and in a DR site.

Use Case 3: Disaster Recovery using NetApp ONTAP
With ONTAP data can be replicated between two storage instances using SnapMirror. Data replication can occur between production on premise, private cloud and IBM cloud. This allows failing over to a standby Db2 Warehouse Cluster. This flexibility allows for a lower TCO, risk and full compatibility with my existing business applications. This is a perfect Data Fabric use case for ONTAP and we will highlight how easy it is to set it up. In addition, the replicated data at the DR site can be used for additional testing using ONTAPâ€™s cloning feature.

To get started download one of these trial versions from the Docker Store:

Published on November 27, 2017
by Mitesh Shah, Product Manager, Hybrid Data Management Platform, IBM
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Mitesh Shah is the product manager for Hybrid Data Management platform of offerings, mainly Data Warehousing solutions, uniquely positioned for virtual private clouds and platforms that support Docker container technology. He has broad experience around various facets of software development along with business systems analysis, and program testing; known for ability to analyze complex issues with an analytical mindset, incubate and streamline innovative solutions, and promote a consensus-driven work environment that contributes to on-time and on-budget delivery. Throughout his career, Mitesh has enjoyed a focus on helping clients address their data management and solution architecture needs.